Level 5 Networks, Inc.

Level 5 Networks was founded in 2002 with the vision of making Ethernet a viable technology for high performance computing (HPC). Their headquarters is in Sunnyvale, California, USA and they maintain engineering centers in Sunnyvale, California, USA and Cambridge, UK.

Level 5 Networks' EtherFabric is a high-performance Ethernet network interface card (NIC) and software that provides a virtual network interface for applications on networked servers. By improving server efficiency EtherFabric allows the applications to use server resources that have been previously consumed by the operating system to perform network processing. This dramatically accelerates application performance without changing the existing IT infrastructure. EtherFabric's virtual network interface also lets each application bypass critical server I/O bottlenecks in the Service-Oriented Enterprise (SOE). This solution, which is standards-based, uses the well-known sockets API to establish a low latency, high speed data path between applications and the Ethernet network infrastructure. EtherFabric delivers significant gains in application performance without requiring changes to the network or the applications.

High performance computing (HPC) applications, tend to become server I/O constrained as the size of the HPC grows. Users are forced to trade-off performance for compatibility by either accepting the sub-optimal performance of conventional Ethernet or attempting to address the interconnect performance issue by deploying non-Ethernet network interconnect technologies. EtherFabric eliminates the server I/O bottleneck with a low latency and high performance solution that is fully compatible with the existing Ethernet-based IT infrastructure. Level 5 Networks' EtherFabric provides ease of installation and maintenance, and supportability while dramatically accelerating the performance of the FLUENT application.